Abstract
Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Mazeppa (1854) recreates a narrative that portrays Cossack commander Ivan Mazeppa's torturous Ride – bound naked to an unbroken horse – to miraculous survival and triumph. To evoke this legend, Liszt incorporated familiar musical tropes: persistent galloping triplets, fanfares, apotheosis and a march-like finale. These tropes illustrate a consistent story, but they risk sounding merely clichéd and mimetic. To appreciate how Liszt uses these tropes to create depth and compositional creativity in Mazeppa requires consideration of the myth's intertextuality. This article considers the broader sources that informed Liszt's Mazeppa and offers an interpretation that includes the programme's preface and an array of Mazeppa ‘texts’ that have appeared since the mid-eighteenth century. These texts include a quasi-historical narrative, poetry and visual art along with Liszt's original commentary for Mazeppa and his defence of programme music in his Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony essay. Taking all of this together, my approach in this article is to analyse Mazeppa as if listening for the protagonist and letting the character of his musical subject inform my interpretation. Hearing the musical subject in this work requires attention to voice, expressivity, motives, gestures, themes and extramusical intertexts to construct, layer by layer, an interpretation of Mazeppa's symbolic significance. I argue that connecting these threads of cultural history illuminates the piece's theme of suffering and death as inescapable companions in the life of the creative genius.
Published Version
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